For everyone that has cellular based equipment, what are you doing for service? Who is the carrier/provider and what do they call the service? How does it work? Any caveats, design gotchas, other notable attributes of benefit or concert?
I ask because as a more traditional network engineer, I understand the idea of putting a sim chip in a cradle point and it getting an Internet connection (possibly an RFC 1918 address)… but where i get stuck is the different service options for what I would call small to medium scale deployments (not talking about doing a 10,000 soda machine rollout).
I have previously done standalone carrier issued SIMs with buckets of data and getting private ip addressed which a CGNAT to the Internet. On a larger scale, about 75 sites, I have used an aggregator with a private APN (possibly wrong terminology) which worked well. Charged per active SIM with a pool of shared data, provisioning was done via their portal which was nice, just keep a brick of sims on hand and provision as needed. Portal also gave data usage reports (with a few hour collection delay) so I could tell how much I was using across all sites. One design challenge was all connections were presented in a single customer private VRF with private addresses and backhauled Internet to their data center in a single place which made for some suboptimal Internet traffic flows. Hardware was USB cellular modem attached to Fortigate firewall, which strangely despite every modem being the same model, support and stability was very unpredictable, one modem not working (but worked fine in my laptop) while the next modem worked just fine.
I would love to hear more about what other people are doing and their experiences with the service.
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